SPN Fic: That Girl With the Face (girl!Sam/Dean) pg-13
Title: That Girl With the Face
Author: downjune
Characters/Pairing: Girl!Sam/Dean
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: I dunno, body image issues and alcoholism?
Word count: ~2100
Disclaimer: I wish Samantha Jean were mine. I guess she's a little closer than Sam, though.
Summary: As if being a Winchester weren't hard enough, Sam sometimes has this problem where she thinks she's hideous. Having her head shaved in the hospital didn't help. Set post-7.17
Note: This is more shamelessly indulgent genderswap wincest. I'm not sorry. Though I am sorry, quickreaver, for stealing your prompt from ohsam! I have a slight addiction to filling my own prompts. It's a thing I brought with me from Harry Potter fandom. I feel quite certain, however, that you'll write something very different from this ;)
Also, apparently I have a bit of a sleep fetish. The Winchesters sleeping is just soothing to me, I guess.
Mm, and I think my Max/Alec icon doubles nicely as a genderswap icon. It's official.
Oh, and, announcement! Rarepair fest fics are up! See if you can guess which one's mine! Now, I'm excited for the samdean_otp mini-bang summaries to go up--I hope my story gets claimed!
And finally, thank you lavishsqualorfor the v-gift! *_*
Sam had never been vain; she'd never even really considered herself pretty. Too tall, too bony, too angular, too boyish. On a job in Philadelphia, she'd told Dean that he shouldn't make a fuss about her interviewing a witness on her own in a bad part of town because men looked at her like she was a freak, not a target. Chin too prominent, shoulders too wide, feet too big.
He'd been hearing it off and on his whole life, Sam sometimes needing to explain the way she looked to Dean as if he weren't intimately familiar with every square inch of her. As if he didn't know the soft and the hard spots as well as his own. As if he needed to be apprised of the situation before he could love them. Knowing the amount of guilt and self-loathing already cluttering up Sam's brain, Dean hated that she sometimes fell prey to these insecurities, too. Being a girl was hard. Like being a Winchester wasn't bad enough.
When she'd been checked in to the hospital, stoned out of her mind and hallucinating a devil on her back, they'd shaved her head. There'd been a nasty cut on her scalp that needed stitching and her hair had been so tangled and dirty that it was deemed a lost cause.
When Dean had seen her the first time after that, he almost cried. Sam's hair had been beautiful, dark and thick and half-way down her back before scissors and a razor took it all off. In the hospital, dying of sleep deprivation, Sam looked almost skeletal, like she was maybe a few hours from just fading out of the world.
That night, when his contacts had turned up nothing and no one to help her, Dean almost drank himself into a hospital visit of his own. Even if there was nothing he could do about the Lucifer hallucinations, he'd still let Sam down. He was supposed to protect her, from her own fractured mind if that's what it took, and he'd failed.
But she was here now, put back together and whole, if a bit more brittle than before.
Three weeks after the hospital, she'd put on some weight and her hair had grown enough to mostly cover the scar behind her ear. The deep shadows under her eyes had receded and she moved easier now. Her joints weren't aching and stiff like they'd been. Still, when she stood in the bathroom and the toothbrush stalled mid-scrub, Dean noticed, looked up from the TV. Since he'd busted her out of the hospital, no music was too loud, no waitress too distractingly hot for Dean not to know what his sister was up to or not up to.
When she didn't start brushing again, Dean shoved himself off the bed and wandered casually over to the bathroom, leaned in the doorway with crossed arms.
"You awake there, Sammy? No sleeping with toothpaste in your mouth."
Blinking at him, she promptly leaned over and spit into the sink, rinsed out her mouth, and put her toothbrush back in its travel case.
"Is it time to sleep yet?" she asked, eyes focused somewhere in middle distance.
"Not really. It's only 7:30."
Nodding, she walked past him out into the motel room. "You goin' out tonight?"
Still leaning in the bathroom doorway, Dean watched her bend down by her duffel to pull out flannel pajamas and a white t-shirt. Her jeans were held up with a belt and hung looser than they should, sagging a little in the ass. Her fitted plaid shirt rode up, exposing the dimples above her hips as well as the bumps of her spine. Her short hair was almost as jarring as when Dean'd first seen it in the hospital.
"Not unless you want to," he finally answered.
"Dean, I'm not sure I'm ever gonna want to. You should go; you've hung out with me enough nights. I'm fine on my own."
"Do you want me to go?"
Glancing up at him with a very familiar pinched look, Sam started to strip. She kept her eyes on Dean as she unbuttoned her shirt and slid it off her shoulders. Then she peeled off her undershirt, exposing her small firm breasts. His eyes were drawn to her ribs and the shallow inward curve of her stomach. But he kept himself from wincing at how far she still had to go and met her eyes again.
She was daring him to say something, make some comment about how she needed to eat more, get back into a training regimen to build up some of the muscle she'd lost. But he said nothing, only watched her shrug into the loose, almost see-through t-shirt. It used to be one of his. When she let her jeans fall to the floor, he followed them down with his eyes. He'd always loved her legs, long, knock-kneed and scarred, made for running.
"Do you want me to stay?"
Pulling on the flannel pants, Sam mumbled, "I want to not feel like a freak show. Wanna feel normal again."
"Not sure that last one's in the cards, Sammy."
"Normal for us, then."
Dean cast about for inspiration, but there wasn't much to be found in their dingy damp room. "Weapons check?" he offered. "I'll take the .45; you do the 9 mm. Bet I can do a faster field strip than you."
Sam offered him a grateful smile, already drifting closer to the table. "You haven't been able to since I was sixteen-why would now be any different?"
"Those are big words."
Eyebrows raised, she made a show of placing his favorite Colt and a clean rag on the table for him, then picked up her own 9 mm. "Well, you're a big man; you can handle little old Samantha Jean, can't you?"
Dean grinned, dropping down into the waiting chair and wriggling his fingers in readiness. "Bring it, Sammich."
"On three."
They were both handicapped, so it was actually pretty close. Dean had enough whiskey in him to warm his guts and slow down his fingers, and Sam was sleeping every chance she got, making up for lost time, so she was just a little sloppy and loose around the edges. In the end, Dean got distracted watching her - the butt of the gun in her palm, the easy way she ejected the magazine, the way her long fingers pulled the slide and pried out its component parts - and finished a few seconds behind.
He was just as smitten as when she'd turned sixteen and he realized that there was something more than respect and affection making his belly warm.
Managing to beat her reassembling his gun, he grinned proudly as he shoved the magazine back in and replaced the Colt on its rag. Glancing up at her, he had to look way up as she rose and stood next to his chair. His eyes fell closed when she put fingers that smelled like gun oil in his hair and drew him into her, gently pressing his face against her stomach.
Wrapping his arm around her hip, he held on, rubbed his nose against her shirt and breathed in her soft sleepy smell.
"How fucked up is it that you make me feel normal, Dean?" she asked, voice vibrating through her belly against his ear.
Dean huffed a laugh. "No more than that fucked up is normal for us."
Sam carded her fingers through his hair and then tipped his head back. "Can you sleep with me tonight?" she asked, looking uneasy, a little flushed. "Not to... I don't want-not to fuck, okay? Just to sleep."
Dean nodded, quietly relieved. Since Cas had taken down her wall, and even after he'd fixed the worst of the consequences, Sam hadn't gone anywhere near sex with a partner other than Dean. And they'd only done it a handful of times, when adrenalin or some decent porn was enough to get her worked up.
Dean was fine with that. Whiskey kept his libido pretty soggy and he hadn't figured out a way to give that up yet, so. They were both basically celibate. It was kind of pathetic and definitely sad, but it was all they could handle so he didn't worry too much. What would be the point?
"Yeah, just as long as you don't elbow me in the throat like last time," he finally answered.
She snorted, stomach jumping. "Dude, I thought you were the devil. I already apologized for that."
"I know, Sammy," he said, pushing himself to his feet and then walking his sister backwards to the bed. In her white t-shirt and pajama bottoms, and with her short short hair, she looked like a cancer survivor.
And she was still more beautiful than any woman he'd ever taken for a tumble. Bigger tits and curvier hips always drew his eye, but Sam's body was so lived in, so familiar, that even the dry patches of skin on her elbows were attractive to him.
Because he liked to do it, and because Sam let him, he picked her up by the backs of her thighs and knelt up onto the bed. Her legs wrapped strong around his sides, and there was a time when that would have sent him through the roof, but now he only felt the sharpness of her bones and the way she clung to him like she was six, Dean carrying her to the car when Dad had them on the road in the middle of the night.
He laid her down on the bed and then dragged the blankets down so they were on the sheet rather than the sleazy bedspread. Pulling the pillow over his shoulder so his arm wouldn't fall asleep, Dean settled her against his side, elbow bent under her head so he could touch the soft down of her hair. He wasn't sure whether to tell her that he liked the way it felt on his palm. She was still so sensitive about it.
Sighing deeply, Sam relaxed against him, rolled onto her side so that she could swing her leg across his and stick her nose close by his ear. Her breathing slowed and Dean figured she'd be out like a light, but after a few moments, he felt her fingers on his chest, plucking at his flannel shirt then scraping against the stubble on his jaw.
"I used to be jealous of you, Dean," she said, breath tickling his neck. "Did you know that?"
"Mm? No. Why would you be jealous a'me?"
"You were so much cooler than me, better at hunting, better at training. Better looking." She touched his mouth, traced his lips with her fingers. "The girls went nuts for you. It drove me crazy how much they wanted you, how they looked at you and talked about you. Next to you, I was this... I was nobody. Couldn't get their attention; didn't know what to do with yours."
Dean was silent, unsure of what to say to a confession like that.
"I realized later that some girls liked the way I was, the way I looked. Knew you did. Knew I didn't need to be pretty for you. But I still-sometimes I still feel like this... horrific thing. Like after everything I've done, it all shows. Everyone can see how-"
Dean rolled on top of her, a small abortive noise getting stuck in his throat. He braced himself on his elbows and rested his forehead against hers, rubbed their noses together, and closed his eyes. "You got part of that right, Sammy. Everything about you shows. You've never been any good at hidin' it-the good or the bad. But it's never been ugly. You were never ugly."
Her cheeks were wet and Dean dried them with his thumbs. "And if it's about your hair, you could get to like it, you know? Lots of gorgeous women rock the short hair-Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, that British girl you like with the face-"
"Carey Mulligan."
"Yeah, her."
Underneath him, her whole body twitched with laughter and he grinned when he felt her knees slip up to bracket his hips. He'd had enough to drink that, when she planted one foot on the mattress and shoved, she was able to roll them over, and when he landed the room spun. Smiling sleepily at him and sniffing a little, she settled lower on his chest and rested her head on her arms, ear over his heart.
"I'm tired, Dean," she said, words muffled by her hand.
"Yeah. You should sleep for awhile." With her draped over his chest, the remote and his beer were just out of reach, so he closed his eyes, too.